Accessibility Guidelines

In May 2016, six Vox Media team members gathered in Washington, D.C. for two days to figure out how to approach accessibility on a company-wide scale. We picked this project back up a few months later and built a tool anyone can use.

Role

Senior Front-End Engineer, Documentation

The Project

Accessibility is important. As creators, it is our responsibility to make sure that anyone — no matter the situation — can access it. Many of us at Vox Media recognized this, but we had no structures in place to implement standards across the board. With the support of our managers, six of us decided to take a two day break from our daily work, and spend the time focusing on how we could improve accessibility across the company.

Over two days, we documented best practices based on role and how to incorporate accessibility into our work flows. We shared the documentation across the company, but also knew at some point that we’d love to open source these docs. A few months later, we decided to pick the project back up at our company’s annual hack week. We spent some time figuring out what format we should be sharing our docs in — so we decided to base our website off of how we had started to use the docs internally, which was by creating project specific checklists for each role to use as a guideline.

The idea behind the checklist was that users could go through and select items that related to their project and generate their own version to be copied and pasted into their project management tool of choice. In order to make contributing to the documentation as simple as possible for anyone within the company or outside, we chose to build the site using Jekyll and hosting on GitHub pages.